RCA Forum Working Groups

Introduction

We support or steer research and the development of guidance material through our working groups. Working groups have been established as the need arose to develop guidance on the management of stormwater and road run-off, stock crossings and stock effluent spilled on roads from stock trucks, funding of pavement maintenance for low volume roads, steering research on cycling markings and providing resources related to providing for walking and cycling. The Research and Guidelines Steering Group has also worked to provide guidelines for members on sustainable herbicide management to avoid herbicide-resistant weeds becoming established, and research on issues surrounding the increasing uptake of mobility scooters.

For a list of resources or research produced by working groups or relating to specific topic areas, go to the Resources list.

Guidelines for equitable funding of pavement maintenance for low volume roads have been developed by the Special Interest Group on Low Volume Roads. The 2018 Revision incorporates suggested changes from the legal review done by Simpson Grierson. The Guidelines provide a method for councils to allocate to rating units the costs of pavement maintenance made necessary by heavy vehicle traffic generated by land uses on those units. The method allows an equitable allocation of costs between differing land uses. Case studies are being developed to demonstrate the implementation of the Guidelines. The first has been prepared for Te Wairoa.

Guidelines on Management of Road Run-off have been developed and published by the Stormwater Group.

A Stormwater Risk Assessment Guide for Road Engineers has been designed as a practical guide for road asset managers and roading practitioners to assess the potential for environmental effects from stormwater from roads.

Rain-garden Maintenance Guidelines have been developed to provide an introduction to rain-garden maintenance, with a suggested maintenance schedule and short troubleshooting section.

Further resources are available through the extensive range of relevant research that has been undertaken within New Zealand over the past two decades. See Stormwater Research and extensive resource list in Stormwater Issues.

Guidelines for Stock Crossings have been developed by the Stock Crossings Working Group. Draft Guidelines were issued in 2004. These Guidelines were reviewed and the second version was released in 2010. A further review led to the third version of the Guidelines being released in 2014. The Stock Crossings Working Group also developed a Model Bylaw for Livestock Movements for use by any Council wishing to regulate the movement of livestock across or along roads within its district. The Model Bylaw and a Commentary on its use are incorporated into the Guidelines.

The National Stock Effluent Working Group developed three publications:

The fully revised 4th edition of the Practical Guide to Providing Facilities for Stock Effluent Disposal from Trucks was released in October 2013 and replaced the 3rd edition released in 2005.

The Research and Guidelines Steering Group supported and contributed to research being led by the Foundation for Arable Research to develop Glyphosate resistance management strategies (August 2014) to ensure that road asset managers have in place appropriate protocols for monitoring roadside spraying and reporting incidences of apparent failure of spray treatments, and for rotating treatments.

References

The RCA Forum wants to identify best practice, particularly where local circumstances might necessitate variations or identify potential improvement. Any proposal to include new, or major changes to currrent reference documents in the Register of Network Standards and Guidelines will be notified to users and posted there. Feedback from members is sought on any new or changed documents approved for consultation and comment by the Ratification Group.

Feedback should be provided to the Research and Guidelines Steering Group, which will consider the feedback and, if necessary, report to all members at a meeting of the RCA Forum, but otherwise it will report with a recommendation to the Ratification Group on adoption of the proposal as a Local Status document.

Research

We also want to publicise research to encourage wider adoption and application of the recommendations and findings from research. We provide a summary of recent NZTA research reports and other presentations and a short list of currently active research projects and recent projects completed as part of post-graduate or doctoral theses at Canterbury University School of Engineering that might be of use to members.

The reference documents being developed by the RIMS Group Body of Knowledge project have been approved by the Ratification Group at its November 2013 meeting as providing Other Reference Documents, rather than Guidelines. The Road Efficiency Group has listed several of these projects as case studies, and has also prepared a toolkit for working with the One Network Road Classification system.